The present invention relates to formation of a document from one or more sources of information and, in particular, to the reproduction, preferably by printing, of the document onto physical, human readable media in a manner so as to retain in the reproduction certain links or similar structures present in the sources.
Techniques exist for the generating, formatting, displaying, saving or printing of structured documents, hierarchical documents, documents written in a markup language such as SGML, HTML or XML, and also for other forms of non-linear documents. Such techniques may provide formatted human-readable clear-text output or another alternative document format or presentation from that of the original document source-data. Typically however, any non-linear or structure information, or hyperlinking facility within the original document source data will be either lost, is ignored or rendered solely as textual information which is only passively informative to any reader.
One typical example of a source of tagged or hyperlinked non-linear documents is the so-called world-wide-web (WWW). A user may browse many disparate, but hyperlinked information sources in a non-linear manner on the web with the intent to access, create and print a personalized document containing or including one or more parts of one or more source documents encountered. Typically, the selection by the user of source documents or their partitioning, ultimately for assembly and printing as a single document, is strongly suggested by those tags or hyperlinks contained within the source document or documents. Typically, these tags or hyperlinks interconnect various parts of the source document, or parts of separate source documents with the interconnections being of various types including contextual, referential, informative, descriptive, elaborative, consequential or inconsequential and even linearly progressive.
Currently available arrangements permit a user to gather the document parts or documents"" parts of interest and to assemble these into a whole, customized document which will be typically partitioned, cross-referenced or interconnected by the tags or hyperlinks which were distributed within the source documents. These original tags or hyperlinks, as selected by the user, will be the primary means of access and reference internally between sections of the newly customized document and typically, would have been the primary means of selecting or specifying the part or parts of the source documents for assembly of the final customized document. The implication is, therefore, that the user will wish to continue to refer to the tags or hyperlinks as an active and efficient, and perhaps as the sole, means of accessing or referencing the customized document, regardless of its final form, format or medium.
If the user wishes to print a typical customized document containing tags or hyperlinks assembled in the manner described above, then current arrangements permit textual printing of the hyperlinks within the document body, or as an appendix, footnote or similar. Such arrangements therefore cause the loss of the accessibility, active interconnection or referential properties of the hyperlinks through the process of printing the customized document. The user is thus forced to use some other method of accessing, indexing or referencing the contents of the customized document. Typically, the user is forced into a linear access method for the printed document, despite the original selection of the contents being made via a non-linear interconnection or hyperlinked method.
The present invention addresses the above deficiencies through preserving the interconnection and access properties of the original tags or hyperlinks once the customized document has been printed or otherwise reproduced,
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a method of creating a representation of information from at least one electronically accessible source of said information, said information including at least one referential link between first matter in said information and second matter in said information, said method comprising the steps of:
electronically extracting said information from said at least one source;
identifying said referential link to establish a referential path between the first matter and the second matter;
arranging the information as a document in a format suitable for hard copy reproduction in which each of said first matter and said second matter are individually identifiable, and
using said referential path to incorporate into said document and format a user interpretable functional link between the first matter and the second matter.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a displayable document comprising information for hard copy reproduction, said information including a identifiable first link between first matter within said document and second matter within said document, characterised by a functional second link referring from the first matter to the second matter, said functional second link being formed using a association between the first matter and the second matter reproduced in a user interpretable manner in said document.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a document creation system including:
means for accessing electronic information intended for reproduction, the information including at least one hyperlink,
means for formating the accessed information as a contiguous localized document in a reproducible format;
means for incorporating into said localized document at least one functional links related to said at least one hyperlink, said at least one functional links being reproducible in said localized document for replicating a function associated with said at least one hyperlink; and
means for displaying the localized document.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a non-linear access method for a hard copy document, said document comprising linearly arranged information and at least one link physically incorporated in said document and coupling first matter in said information with second matter, said method comprising the steps of:
observing a reproduction of said first matter in said information distinguishable from other of said information; and
tracing a physical indicia in said document distinguishable from said information from said first matter to identify said second matter.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a computer program product comprising a computer readable medium incorporating a series of instructions interpretable by a computer for creating a document, said computer program product including:
a first module for accessing electronic information intended for reproduction, the information including at least one hyperlink;
a second module for formatting the accessed information as a contiguous localized document in a reproducible format;
a third module for incorporating into said localized document at least one functional link related to said at least one hyperlink, said at least one functional link being reproducible in said localized document for replicating a function associated with said at least one hyperlink; and
a fourth module for displaying the localized document.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is disclosed a computer system comprising:
input apparatus for interfacing user commands to said system:
a processor device couplable to a computer network from which a plurality of electronic documents are accessible, said documents including one or more hyperlinks, said processor device being configured to operate a computer program in response to said user commands to access selected ones of said documents intended for reproduction, and to format the accessed documents as a contiguous localized document in a hard copy reproducible format, said formatting including incorporating into said localized document functional links related to said hyperlinks, said functional links being reproducible in a material form in said localized document for replicating functions associated with said hyperlinks; and
a printing device for reproducing said localized document by printing onto a recording medium, said printing device being associated with a further device for forming with said recording medium indicia corresponding to said functional links whereby said indicia are manually accessible using a hard copy reproduction of said localised document to traverse said reproduction in a manner complementing said electronic documents.